After months of rumours, Amazon's set-top box has been revealed at last. And at first glance it's a feature-packed entertainment monster.

For starters, it's one of the most powerful set-top boxes around, despite its little-black-box appearance. A quad-core processor, dedicated graphics chip and 2GB of RAM make it, according to Amazon, three times more powerful than rivals such as the Roku and Apple TV. It's basically a high-end tablet, minus the screen.

As with Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet range, the Fire TV runs on a very heavily modified version of Android, which means no full Google Play Store experience.

Luckily, Amazon's App Store isn't left lacking for content, and lack of the full Google Play library is likely to be less of a problem for a set-top box than it would be for a tablet.

Game on

Multitasking master: Amazon Fire TV is a movie streamer, games console and babysitter

Let's just jump straight to the main course. All that power means that, yes, the Fire TV can play games, and there's a dedicated US$40 controller to take advantage of it.

Aimed at people who'd prefer to play mobile games on the big screen, the Fire TV has thousands of existing games to choose from, with big names like Minecraft and Asphalt 8 among the A-list titles.

Amazon Game Studios also introduced its first game, Sev Zero, a first-person alien shooter with tower defence elements.

The controller itself has all the usual buttons and sticks, along with media playback controls.

Voice search at last

The Fire TV also has another impressive accessory - a bundled remote - which has a built-in microphone for voice search.

That means no more pecking way at individual letters painfully slowly like on the Roku or Apple TV. Simply say the name of an actor, show or movie, and you'll be presented with the search results instantly. Bliss.

There are tonnes of services to choose from too. Amazon Prime Video is naturally one of them, but so is its rival Netflix, along with Hulu, Vimeo, YouTube and more.

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Tasty extras

Multitasking master: Amazon Fire TV is a movie streamer, games console and babysitter

One feature we're looking forward to testing out ourselves is called ASAP. It learns and predicts what content you like and caches it in the background when idle, meaning instant playback without any buffering.

IMDB integration is also on the cards in the form of an 'X-Ray' feature, allowing you to read up about on-screen actors during movies on your Fire HDX tablet.

Other extras include Music in the form of Pandora, iHeartRadio, TuneIn and music purchased from Amazon itself. You can bring up lyrics of songs you're listening to with X-Ray as well, which is handy for spontaneous karaoke nights, if you're into that sort of thing.

Child friendly

Multitasking master: Amazon Fire TV is a movie streamer, games console and babysitter

FreeTime, the Kindle Fire HDX feature which limits children's gaming and video-watching activities also returns, making sure that little Timmy doesn't get too distracted by blasting aliens instead of finishing off his homework.

FreeTime mode also serves up a simpler child-friendly interface with whole host of free children's content from Sesame Street, Nickelodeon and more. FreeTime mode needs a password if you want to revert to the standard interface, for extra peace of mind.

Price and release date

The Kindle Fire TV will be shipping in the US from today, for US$99. We've contacted Amazon with regards to pricing and release dates outside of the States and were told that "Fire TV is not available outside the US at this time and we're not able to speculate on future plans".

Online Editor, Asia

Till now, even the most basic Amazon Kindle e-book readers and Fire tablets have not made its way into Asia Pacific, let alone Singapore. Our advice? Don't expect it here anytime soon.

There are alternatives to have the Fire TV shipped outside of the States. And if you're using a service provider such as MyRepublic which comes with a VPN service, you should be able to access Amazon's services provided you have a valid credit card or Amazon gift card.